On this page
A garage door is the heaviest moving object in most homes, and for many families it's also the real front door — cycled more times a day than anything else in the house. Yet it's routinely the least maintained machine on the property. Almost every emergency call we take announced itself months earlier as a squeak, a shudder or a door that felt a little heavier: a service visit is simply where those warnings get heard.
The right interval for your door
Servicing intervals that actually match the wear
- Typical home, a few opens a day, inland: every 12 months
- Door used as the main entry, or 5+ opens a day: every 6–9 months
- Within ~2km of open water: every 9 months at most (see below)
- Door over 10 years old on original springs: every 6–12 months, watching the springs closely
- Commercial and strata doors cycling all day: every 6 months, fleet-wide on one schedule
The pattern behind those numbers is cycles, not calendar. Springs are rated around 10,000 open-close cycles and every other wearing part — rollers, hinges, cables, the opener's drive — ages the same way. A door opened twice a day and a door opened ten times a day are living completely different lives; service the usage, not the anniversary.
Why exposure changes the answer
This is the part the calendar gets wrong. Salt carried on the wind settles on everything within a few kilometres of the water, and garage hardware takes it badly: spring steel pits, cable strands rust from the bottom bracket up, bearings dry out, and bottom seals perish in the sun-plus-salt combination. We routinely see five-year-old doors near the water carrying the corrosion of a fifteen-year-old door inland. A 12-month interval that is fine on a sheltered street is optimistic on an exposed one — and an occasional freshwater rinse of the door between services genuinely helps.
What a service actually involves
A proper service is a re-tune of the whole machine, not a squirt of lubricant. Ours covers the mechanical half — springs checked and re-tensioned to the door's true weight, tracks, rollers and hinges cleaned and lubricated, cables and drums inspected for fraying, every fixing the door's own vibration has loosened re-tightened — and the electrical half: the opener's force and travel limits reset to the maker's figures (B&D's are in its help and support library, Merlin's in its support centre), remotes checked, safety beams aligned, and the auto-reverse tested against a real obstruction rather than assumed. You get a note of anything wearing and when it will realistically need attention.
Service vs safety inspection
A full service (quoted up front, plus any parts you approve) does the work. The standalone safety inspection is report-only and costs less — the option property managers use at lease change and sellers use before a home open. If the report turns up work you go ahead with, the inspection fee folds into that job.
The checks you can do yourself
- Monthly: close the door onto a piece of timber laid flat — it must touch and reverse immediately; if it does not, check the opener's model against the recall notices on Product Safety Australia as well as booking a visit
- Monthly: with the door down, look along springs and cables for rust, gaps or fraying strands
- Quarterly: pull the manual release (door closed) and lift by hand — smooth and light means balanced
- Twice a year: garage-door lubricant on roller bearings, hinges and spring coils — never inside the tracks
- Always: listen. A door that sounds different this month than last month is telling you something
The line you don't cross
Anything involving spring tension, the cables, or bolts attached to the spring shaft is technician territory. Those parts are under enough load to cause serious injury, and every one of the checks above can be done without touching them.
When to book sooner than scheduled
Ignore the calendar and book straight away if the door starts grinding or popping, feels noticeably heavier by hand, rises crooked, slams instead of settling, or fails the timber test above. Each of those is a specific component announcing itself — and the difference between attending to it now and attending to it after the bang is usually a much bigger bill and one very inconvenient morning.
The cost argument, honestly
Run the numbers side by side. The service is one planned visit on a day you choose, quoted before it happens. The failures it most often prevents — a snapped spring, frayed cables, an opener repair — each cost several times the service itself, plus a stuck car, plus an after-hours surcharge when the door fails at night or on a weekend, which garage doors have a talent for. An unserviced door also works its opener harder every cycle, so the motor dies years early. One planned visit a year is the smallest job we do, and it's the visit that makes the expensive ones rarer.